Hemingway

  I find that knowing something of the writer's background is helpful for me in understanding their work. I should have been a historian, I tend towards categorizing writers not by personality but historical epoch. One thing wholly lacking in prison is information. The federal Bureau of Prisons is quite terrified of the internet, so no Google. This lack of information aids in infantilizing prisoners. This is part of a series of writers that I did look up when I got internet access. Some will be about the writer, and others may feature the writer. I went to YouTube for my main source, but others will also include some other material relating to the book or author discussed. One thing I did not have when younger was access to information about how writers wrote. I think that kept me from understanding the actual work, which, in turn, led me away from writing.

 Ernest Hemingway is a tough writer for me. The public persona lost any allure when I read Kurt Vonnegut's play Happy Birthday, Wanda June. I think the public persona of boozing, brawling, safaris, and deep sea fishing detract from the writer. I think it was reading his Moveable Feast that made me wonder why no one noticed this guy was depressed and heading for suicide. 

As a writer, I am not taken with novels. When I was young, For Whom The Bells Toll enthralled me. Not when I re-read it in my fifties. I never liked The Sun Also Rises when I had to read it in college, but the first of his novels I read was The Old Man and the Sea. That was in seventh grade. That held up when I re-read it in prison. Thankfully, it is short and not as baggy as For Whom The Bells Toll; my opinion might be different if it were longer. To Have and Have Not surprised me by its mediocrity.

No, what makes Hemingway important for me is in his short stories. The Hemingwayesque does not overstay its welcome as much as in the short stories.

Then, lastly, I pay attention to what he says about writing because he seems to have taken care with his writing. 

Teaching Hemingway: So Ugly, So Beautiful | Mark Ott | TEDxDeerfield - I like this one for several reasons: 1) it talks about Hemingway's aesthetics, and 2) he puts A Farewell to Arms front and center. I now think that is his best novel.

More writing advice from Hemingway; more than some I heave read/heard of before, and all that seem to be on point:

And now Vladimir Nabokov criticizes Hemingway:

I thought more interesting was how nowadays this type of criticism could not be leveled by one writer against another. First, I am not so sure if that is true - it seems the writers of autofiction to have come under fire. Assuming it is true, is this because writers are too busy marketing themselves to read?

I cannot avoid adding these two Hemingway pastiches. For all the power that Hemingway's style had, it seems presently its most often expression is in parody. Yeah, so? The best are good examples of how that style can work.

Anne Lived in Gables. They Were Green. by Ernest Hemingway (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency)

Ernest Hemingway’s Shark Week (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency)

I close out with a video biography of Hemingway. While I agree with its point of empathy and tolerance, I was also left with a different vision of Hemingway was klutz.

Some articles I ran across:

Revisiting the Classics: ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ and Me (TOD WORNER)

When my wife saw me reading The Old Man and the Sea, she grimaced. “Ugh. I didn’t like that book. I remember reading it in ninth grade and it just went on and on.” But I was blown away by it. An old man, washed up in the eyes of all but a faithful boy, carries on. Bereft of his wife, financial comfort, and professional success, Santiago puts out into the deep. His young eyes, which Hemingway describes as “the same color as the sea,” saw things differently. Hilaire Belloc described such eyes once in a shepherd  he met in the high Downs over Findon Village: “[He] had in his eyes that reminiscence of horizons which makes the eyes of shepherds and of mountaineers different from the eyes of other men … He was perpetually in perception of the Unknown Country.” Through those same eyes, the old man saw vast waters and towering skyscapes, majestic marlins and menacing sharks with unbending faith and unshakable resolution. And when he towed the ravaged husk of his prize to the docks of his home harbors, he embodied the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt’s immortal words, 

[The credit belongs to the man] who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1937) by Ernest Hemingway (Tipping My Fedora)

The book uses racist language (the n word and many references to “yellow stuff”) that really grates and makes it feel dated more than merely set in past. In addition, given the way it was composed, it does sometimes lack a uniform feel, not always holding up very well as a novel in terms of development as it does seem to stop and start a few times too often. Having said that, the experimental use of multiple narrators (Harry narrates the opening himself, then we shift to the third person, and concludes with the point of view of Mary, Harry’s wife with other switches and narrators in between) is handled quite well and we do get a fascinating view of Harry from multiple perspective, not all of them flattering. But throughout it all, Harry remains a compelling character, and the depiction of the grim life during the depression well done without toppling into heavy-handed social commentary. In addition there is some surprisingly terse and well-handled action scenes and a grim finale as experienced from the perspective of Harry’s wife that certainly pulls at the heart-strings very effectively.

“For Whom the Bell Tolls Is a Very Strange Book”—Alex Vernon, Hemingway Scholar (The Volunteer)

What’s so strange about it?

The book has often been read in what we could call the John McCain way, assuming Robert Jordan is a relatively straightforward romantic hero. To be sure, he fights for the Communists, but that’s okay because he fights for what he believes in, plus he meets this amazing girl, María. To my mind, that straightforward reading doesn’t do justice to the book’s contradictions and complexities. For starters, for all Hemingway’s famous minimalism, this is an extremely maximalist novel. Yet if his minimalist style tends to obscure his characters, the same is true for this maximalist text, which also obscures how complicated Robert Jordan really is. The plot—the bombing of the bridge—tempts us to read fast, but once we slow down and pay attention to each sentence, each allusion, we run into some very weird things. Jordan’s relationship to María, for example, is bizarre. Queer studies scholars have had much to say about that. 

The Transformations of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Clifton Fadiman (The New Yorker , 1940)

But there, I think, the resemblance ends. For this book is not merely an advance on “A Farewell to Arms.” It touches a deeper level than any sounded in the author’s other books. It expresses and releases the adult Hemingway, whose voice was first heard in the groping “To Have and Have Not.” It is by a better man, a man in whom works the principle of growth, so rare among American writers.

***

This utterance (I suppose it is one of the greatest sentences in English) is about death and says yes to life. That men confer value on life by feeling deeply each other’s mortality is the underlying theme of the novel. Here is something other than Hemingway’s old romantic absorption in death, though growing out of it. Remember that “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is an anti-Fascist novel. “Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde.” All of what the dictator most profoundly and religiously disbelieves is in that sentence. Hemingway is no fool. He portrays many of the Loyalists as cowards, brutes, and politicians—as they undoubtedly were. He portrays some of the Fascists as men of twisted nobility—as they undoubtedly were. But he knows that the war, at its deepest level (the first battle of the war now on your front pages), is a war between those who deny life and those who affirm it. And if it is not yet such a war, it must become so, or it will, no matter who wins, have been fought in vain. I take that to be the central feeling of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and that is why the book is more than a thrilling novel about love and death and battle and a finer work than “A Farewell to Arms.”

***

So I do not much care whether or not this is a “great” book. I feel that it is what Hemingway wanted it to be: a true book. It is written with only one prejudice—a prejudice in favor of the common human being. But that is a prejudice not easy to arrive at and which only major writers can movingly express. 

 I forgot, or maybe did not, understand this aspect of this novel. There was a time when I favored death more than life. Getting past that I destroyed my old life, I almost succeeded in suicide, but then I had to find a way to live in a way that was not running at death. 

There I will close. Pain and torture brought us a great art. We need to respect that. I do not think we need to copy the Hemingwayesque hero, or Hemingway's life, but we need to pay attention to the effort he put into his work, the seeking of one true sentence.

sch 7/21